Queueing analysis of opportunistic scheduling with spatially correlated channels

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Automated haematology analysis to diagnose malaria

© 2010 licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.For more than a decade, flow cytometry-based automated haematology analysers have been studied for malaria diagnosis. Although current haematology analysers are not specifically designed to detect malaria-related abnormalities, most studies have found sensitivities that comply with WHO malaria-diagnostic guidelines, i.e. ≥ 95% in samples with > 100 parasites/μl. Establishing a correct and early malaria diagnosis is a prerequisite for an adequate treatment and to minimizing adverse outcomes. Expert light microscopy remains the 'gold standard' for malaria diagnosis in most clinical settings. However, it requires an explicit request from clinicians and has variable accuracy. Malaria diagnosis with flow cytometry-based haematology analysers could become an important adjuvant diagnostic tool in the routine laboratory work-up of febrile patients in or returning from malaria-endemic regions. Haematology analysers so far studied for malaria diagnosis are the Cell-Dyn®, Coulter® GEN•S and LH 750, and the Sysmex XE-2100® analysers. For Cell-Dyn analysers, abnormal depolarization events mainly in the lobularity/granularity and other scatter-plots, and various reticulocyte abnormalities have shown overall sensitivities and specificities of 49% to 97% and 61% to 100%, respectively. For the Coulter analysers, a 'malaria factor' using the monocyte and lymphocyte size standard deviations obtained by impedance detection has shown overall sensitivities and specificities of 82% to 98% and 72% to 94%, respectively. For the XE-2100, abnormal patterns in the DIFF, WBC/BASO, and RET-EXT scatter-plots, and pseudoeosinophilia and other abnormal haematological variables have been described, and multivariate diagnostic models have been designed with overall sensitivities and specificities of 86% to 97% and 81% to 98%, respectively. The accuracy for malaria diagnosis may vary according to species, parasite load, immunity and clinical context where the method is applied. Future developments in new haematology analysers such as considerably simplified, robust and inexpensive devices for malaria detection fitted with an automatically generated alert could improve the detection capacity of these instruments and potentially expand their clinical utility in malaria diagnosis

Information decomposition of multichannel EMG to map functional interactions in the distributed motor system

The central nervous system needs to coordinate multiple muscles during postural control. Functional coordination is established through the neural circuitry that interconnects different muscles. Here we used multivariate information decomposition of multichannel EMG acquired from 14 healthy participants during postural tasks to investigate the neural interactions between muscles. A set of information measures were estimated from an instantaneous linear regression model and a time-lagged VAR model fitted to the EMG envelopes of 36 muscles. We used network analysis to quantify the structure of functional interactions between muscles and compared them across experimental conditions. Conditional mutual information and transfer entropy revealed sparse networks dominated by local connections between muscles. We observed significant changes in muscle networks across postural tasks localized to the muscles involved in performing those tasks. Information decomposition revealed distinct patterns in task-related changes: unimanual and bimanual pointing were associated with reduced transfer to the pectoralis major muscles, but an increase in total information compared to no pointing, while postural instability resulted in increased information, information transfer and information storage in the abductor longus muscles compared to normal stability. These findings show robust patterns of directed interactions between muscles that are task-dependent and can be assessed from surface EMG recorded during static postural tasks. We discuss directed muscle networks in terms of the neural circuitry involved in generating muscle activity and suggest that task-related effects may reflect gain modulations of spinal reflex pathways

A Web2.0 Strategy for the Collaborative Analysis of Complex Bioimages

Loyek C, Kölling J, Langenkämper D, Niehaus K, Nattkemper TW. A Web2.0 Strategy for the Collaborative Analysis of Complex Bioimages. In: Gama J, Bradley E, Hollmén J, eds. Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis X: 10th International Symposium, IDA 2011, Porto, Portugal, October 29-31, 2011. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 7014. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011: 258-269